Re: Invoice Billing Process

Hello Patrice,

Did you work with SSA GT Support Center on your problems? When was your V4R5
upgrade done - was it recent or over a year ago? What you say about 'most
logicals being ignored and indexes being constantly rebuilt' -- this could
just be a failure to apply the existing SQL fixes to the operating system.
We know of nothing doing this at V4R5 today with proper fixes applied to the
operating system.

V6004 is an older BPCS release for us, and you don't mention what BPCS
cumulative level you are on - did you have the last cume for that release?
Did you apply the recommended IBM PTFs from the Info APAR ii12963 ? Are you
certain that you have applied all the latest 6004 performance BMRs from SSA
GT already to your programs before you started to work on performance tuning
them? Your note did not say what other steps you took to investigate the
problem before you used the IBM tool to find/build new indexes.

In the very early days of the release of V4R5 (nearly 2 years ago now),
there were some definite problems, and that is when SSA GT Support worked
with IBM Support and identified some APARS (IBM put out some new PTFs) added
many recommended PTFs to the Info APAR for BPCS. So, if your upgrade to V4R5
was recent, then this kind of major problem should not happen as long as you
have applied all the recommended PTFs from IBM listed in APAR II12963. If
you upgraded a long time ago, maybe you ran into the problem before IBM put
out the PTF to fix it ?

It is very typical to have to retune a few programs when you upgrade the
operating system, because of changes to the SQL optimizer, so this would not
be considered unusual. I am speaking about a bug where many many BPCS
programs were having very serious performance issues, and the access plan of
the object was rebuilding each time it was used, and thus the object size
would grow and would exceed the operating system limits within a very short
time so that it could no longer even be saved with the object. This was all
resolved with operating system fixes over 2 years ago.

There is also a Product Bulletin we posted on the SSA GT OGS Web site (from
August 2000) with a recommendation to be certain to apply the PTFs that
resolved this bug onto your system before running BPCS on V4R5 - These same
PTFs were listed in the II12963 also (now the original PTF has been
superseded, so it lists the new one). The PTFs that fixed the major bug are
now on a cumulative package from IBM (C0294450), so as long as you had
applied the latest cume (if you recently did the V4R5 upgrade), it would
also have prevented this major problem.

The link to our bulletin is:
http://ogs.ssax.com/lvlone/products/bulletins/product_bulletins.asp?ID=105 .

As long as the Info APAR recommendations are followed, there is nothing to
our knowledge that is making the V4R5 system ignore most logicals and
constantly rebuild indexes.

You say that you have already fixed the problems yourself. Please report
future performance problems to Support Center or to IBM, if you want us or
IBM to be able to make BMRs or PTFs for them. Also the Support Center can
let you know if what you are experiencing is a known issue, with an existing
fix or workaround already in place for you to download or implement.

Thanks,

Genyphyr Novak
SSA GT

----- Original Message -----
From: <patrice.dicioccio@shiseido-sif.fr>
To: <bpcs-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2002 3:01 AM
Subject: Re: Invoice Billing Process


> Hello,
>
>
> BPCS V604 AS400
> I confirm that performance became very slowly when I've implemented V4R5,
> IBM changed the optimizer in V4R5.
> Most of logicals files are ignored, the optimizer build tempory index all
> the time.
> You  can use "SQL performance monitor" of Operation navigator to see what
> happen. This tool can create index, but it is a very long work to tune a
> lot of transactions!
>
> Is SSA intend to make a BMR to solve this problem of performance for
> release V4R5 and other ?
>
> Thanks
> Patrice di Cioccio
>